When you live in Southern California, you don’t have to get on a plane to see your out-of-town relatives.

They’ll be happy to come and visit you, especially in the summer, when the beaches here look like a postcard and the mosquitoes in other parts of the country are the size of Kansas.

My brother and his family recently came to visit from Utah, indulging in that odd ritual known as “camping at the beach.”

Otherwise sane people – some of whom make a ton of money – think it’s fun to spend a week shoved up like sardines next to total strangers, listening to their conversations, hearing their drunken laughter, trying to block out the noise of their big RV generators, just to be a hundred feet or so from crashing waves.

Beach camping has elements of a Third World experience, what with the lack of electricity, running water and nearby toilets; tending the communal fire; and the need to desperately shove tokens in the common shower, hoping to get a few minutes of hot water to wash.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess that I have been a beach camper many times, though I’ve been going through a 12-step program since I hit middle age.

My brother and his family, all six of them, found themselves last week wedged into a campsite at Doheny State Beach that can only be described as microscopic. In fact, their tent literally would not fit onto it. They had to “borrow” space from the larger campsite next door.

Family togetherness was not an issue, because there was no room to be apart. Luckily, they all get along. And the beach was only one minute away.

Now, my brother makes good money as a software engineer, and he lives in a capacious house with a mountain view in Utah.

He loves to go camping, but usually in remote, pastoral areas with lots of space around him.

The sight of his so-called “campsite” at Doheny – about the size of a parking space for a Lincoln Navigator – sent him into a state of shock that took awhile to wear off.

Fortunately, the six trains that go by every night on tracks that run alongside the campground were enough to snap him out of it. Yes, I said six trains. Headed to San Diego.

So why were my relatives there, along with what seemed like 1.2 million other people? Oh, yes. Those golden, golden sandy beaches and the blue water that glistens in the sun. The roar of the waves, serenading you to sleep.

Personally, I always like the nightly campfires. After a couple of glasses of wine, you can learn a lot of deep dark secrets about people around a campfire that can be useful blackmail fodder later.

When people don’t have access to television or Wi-Fi, it’s amazing what they’ll tell you, especially if tequila is involved.

Plus, with enough tequila, you won’t really hear those six trains going by every night.

Lots of people, of course, like to bring their big RVs to campgrounds like this, and they have lots of advantages, including helping drown out the sound of the trains.

Plus, you have your own bathroom, and don’t need tokens for your shower.

But I haven’t personally succumbed to the siren song of the RV, not really wanting to drive anything that costs more than my house, gets eight miles to the gallon and backs up like a trash truck.

Plus, I actually like sleeping in a tent, especially when I make my teenagers assemble my Bubba cot for me.

It’s not really called a Bubba cot in the catalog, but it’s an enormous cot with a mattress the size of a twin bed, and I can just imagine some deer hunter named Bubba sleeping on it in the deep woods of Alabama.

It’s heavy and a pain to use, sort of like an RV, but once it’s assembled, I still get to sleep in a tent. On a bed. If this sounds appealing, it’s actually called an Outfitter XL and I bought it from Cabela’s, after trying it out at the store near my brother’s house in Utah.

Mostly, I’ve used it in Big Sur. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be crazy enough to camp at Doheny State Beach. There may not be enough tequila in the world for that, especially in campsite 107.

Plus, there’s a very nice Doubletree hotel right across the street. They have good cookies, too. And you probably don’t need tokens for the shower. That’s my kind of ritual.

Marla Jo Fisher was a workaholic hard news reporter before she adopted two children from foster care at age 46, picked up a scruffy dog along the way and somehow managed to keep them all alive, at least so far. She now writes the Frumpy Middle-Age Mom humor column that appears in the Orange County Register weekly. Due to her status as the cheapest person alive, she also writes about deals and bargains for the Register, including her Cheapo Travel column which also runs in newspapers around the country. When she's not having a nervous breakdown, she's usually traveling somewhere cheaply and writing about it.

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